Biographical Data :

Name :

Said Khalil Aburish

Period :

1935 - 2012

Biographical detail :

Writer and historian

A Palestinian journalist, Said Khalil Aburish wrote several books on the region, including a portrait of three generations of his sprawling family. His writing notably blunt accused Arab leaders of being “stooges” of Western powers and indifferent to the wellbeing of their citizens. In his book, ‘A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite’, published in 1997, he wrote what he considered to be the truth. In ‘The House of Saud’ (1994) he attacked the greed and corruption of the Saudi ruling family and predicted its demise.

He also wrote biographies of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (1998), Saddam Hussein (2000) and the Egyptian leader Jamal Abd al-Nasser (2004). He called Nasser the Arab world’s “most charismatic leader since the Prophet Muhammad,” and lamented his failure to unite Arabs as one nation.

Said Khalil Aburish passed away in Bethany, a West Bank village where he was born. He graduated from Princeton and earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. After living in London and Nice, France, he retired to Bethany in 2009.